So as some may know, it's possible to present Windows updates (security hotfixes, etc) to the unattended setup in the windowsPE stage. Just open up your WSIM, go to Insert, and then Packages, and point to the folder containing your update cabs. Fix the xml file later to point to the actual network paths where those files will be at during the installation.
Problem: The install takes something around half an hour longer to install ~150MB of updates over a gigabit link. With the /tempdrive switch. WTF? Well, still better than integrating them into the install.wim... which doesn't work. I'll have to try to install them in post, which I have yet to succeed in.
Drivers can be presented in a similar manner, by using Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsWinPE/DriverPaths. Put your RAID drivers and whatever other drivers you need here.
Problem: The install failed back to the WinPE cmd prompt whenever I presented a path for the Intel Chipset drivers, with the entire network mapping becoming broken and requiring a reboot. After some poking and prodding, and looking at the full debug SAMBA logs, I noticed that it was mainly complaining about one file - 5400.inf. "Hmm, that's the same chipset that I'm using...", thought I. Apparently, Windows installs that chipset driver, which causes some sort of a reinitialization of the networking stack, causing the whole thing to fail horribly. Sigh. Chipset drivers go in postinstall. Unfortunately, the "unattended" setup for the drivers in question provides a nice dialog box to the effect of "everything was aok" on which you need to click to continue. /facepalm
Next up on the fail roll call is a nice error from stage 2 of the 2008 unattended installation process (after the first reboot): "Windows Setup encountered an internal error while loading or searching for an unattend answer file." This gem which produces no output whatsoever in setuperr.log. After a lot of trial and error, this was narrowed down to a setting the gateway on one of the network interfaces. Did I mention that the unattended parameters for that are completely unintuitive? "NextHopAddress"? "Prefix"? Sigh.
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I'm having the same issue "Windows Setup encountered an internal error while loading or searching for an unattend answer file."
ReplyDeleteYou said "After a lot of trial and error, this was narrowed down to a setting the gateway on one of the network interfaces."
Can you elaborate on this? What was set incorrectly?
I had to remove the entire Routes section under every interface. I don't know why MS decided to make this section so confusing, as even technet is ambiguous as to how it should be configured, and WSIM wasn't giving any errors. I add the gateway later at first boot, with something like:
ReplyDeletecmd /c netsh interface ip add address "Local Area Connection" gateway=192.168.0.2 gw=1
Note that this error can probably stem from other "errors" in the answer file that are not detected by WSIM. I had to remove portions of the answer file chunk by chunk before I found that it was the Routes section that was at fault.
HTH.
See a working solution in the following blog: http://blogs.technet.com/rdepagne/archive/2008/11/15/how-to-specify-network-configuration-in-an-unattend-xml-file.aspx
ReplyDeleteThe Identifier of the Interface must be given before the Routes!